How One Word Changes Everything: The Guardian Mangles Agency Copy

‘Assailant’ killed by security forces mentioned in agency copy recast by The Guardian as a ‘man’ – hiding from readers that the dead man is a suspected terrorist.

By Rachel O’Donoghue, HonestReporting

Here are the facts as we know them.

On Saturday evening, three Israeli soldiers were injured in what is believed to be a deliberate car-ramming attack carried out by a Palestinian man near Beit Umar in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria).

The suspect — identified as 23-year-old Mohammed Baradeya, an officer in the Palestinian Authority Security Forces — was shot dead at the scene.

Wire agency AFP, which supplies news copy to thousands of organizations worldwide, reported the incident thus:

“A suspected assailant was killed by Israeli soldiers after a West Bank car ramming Saturday, the army said, in an escalation that threatens to end a relative lull during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan so far.”

The paragraph, while not alluding to terrorism, is clear with regard to the facts: readers are told by the use of the words “suspected assailant” that the ramming was likely intentional, and in the following paragraph the suspect is identified as Palestinian.

Yet, when the Guardian reprinted AFP’s news copy, editors at the outlet made one very small change to the paragraph that profoundly altered its meaning:

“A man was killed by Israeli soldiers after a West Bank car ramming on Saturday, the army said, in an escalation threatening to end a relative lull during the holy month of Ramadan so far.”

The recasting of an assailant into simply a “man” renders the paragraph devoid of factual substance — readers are not told the dead man is a suspected terrorist or that he was behind the wheel of the vehicle.

Interestingly, this was not the only edit made to the story by the Guardian.

While AFP’s original headline read, “Palestinian killed after West Bank car ramming as violence rises,” the Guardian opted to tie the ramming to another suspected terror attack in Jerusalem in which a Palestinian man allegedly snatched an Israeli officer’s gun and fired several shots before being neutralized.

Thus the Guardian’s headline, “Second killing in a day by Israeli forces in Jerusalem and West Bank,” distorts the weekend’s events — at a glance, readers are left with the mistaken impression that two innocent (and presumably) Palestinian people were mercilessly killed by Israeli soldiers.

They are small edits with serious significance — and the Guardian should know this.